


What you do, she'll hear you

by another_Hero



Category: Ocean's (Movies), Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: F/F, a lot of crying??, alcohol mentioned, communication porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 07:18:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16342271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/another_Hero/pseuds/another_Hero
Summary: “When I was gone, I kept thinking,” and she took a sip of her tea, “I didn’t want to come back. But I could only leave the place with April for so long. And I thought once I was actually here—but,” and she took another sip of her tea.This is gonna shock you but: avoiding talking about things hasn't led Lou and Debbie to know the things they want to know





	What you do, she'll hear you

**Author's Note:**

> [Debbie’s (excessive) dress](https://www.saksfifthavenue.com/pamella-roland-asymmetric-illusion-bodycon-dress/product/0400098706435?FOLDER<>folder_id=2534374306418059&R=842393577444&P_name=Pamella+Roland&N=306418059&bmUID=mq3lfB2) \- TELL me this isn't an absurdly Debbie "cutouts" Ocean dress

Letting herself in, Debbie saw Lou in a chair, facing mostly away from her, not entirely still—laughing? No, Debbie realized as she passed her, ungreeted, looking straight ahead but her attention on Lou to her side: crying. She continued upstairs to put the shopping bag on her bed and sat next to it, uncertain. Lou would know she had seen—and she hadn’t chosen to get up and go elsewhere when she heard Debbie approaching the door, which she must have, because there was no sneaking up on Lou. She hadn’t stopped when Debbie came inside. She would know that Debbie knew. But that didn’t mean Debbie could just walk up and ask about her feelings. She would kill a few minutes up here, and then she would go down and make tea, and if Lou wanted to talk to her, well, she would be right there at the table.

So Debbie pulled the dress out of the bag and hung it in her closet, and she browsed the books on her shelf knowing she wouldn’t be carrying any downstairs, and then she walked heavily toward her door. Lou was still in the chair, but she wasn’t looking up at Debbie when Debbie came downstairs. Debbie heated the water for a full pot of tea; when the kettle boiled, Lou came over without being summoned and sat at the table and asked, “Did you get it?” She sounded a little hoarse, sure, but nothing dramatic.

“I did.”

“Can I see it?”

“You’ll see it tonight.” Debbie pulled the Tim-Tams out of the cupboard and slid the container for the cookies halfway out of the plastic sleeve, holding it out to Lou, who took two cookies and lifted them in thanks. Debbie took one and set the rest on the counter and moved the teapot and two mugs to the table. She could have asked: are you all right? She could have asked: what was that about? What she asked was, “Did you get up to anything today?”

Lou shrugged. “Decided to sell the club.”

“Oh?” Debbie got up to grab the Tim-Tams from the counter.

“Yeah, I just—obviously I don’t need it, and I don’t need it keeping me here.”

Debbie went still at the counter, hands on the Tim-Tams, not quite all the way over to her. “Mm?” She pulled herself together, turned around.

“When I was gone, I kept thinking,” and she took a sip of her tea, “I didn’t want to come back. But I could only leave the place with April for so long. And I thought once I was actually here—but,” and she took another sip of her tea.

“Okay,” Debbie said. She slid the cookies across the table; she didn’t want them anymore. Lou pulled the sleeve off entirely. She hadn’t wanted to come back. She still wished she hadn’t. After nearly six years in prison and nearly a year before that, Debbie was hardly in a position to ask Lou not to leave.

Lou bit into a Tim-Tam and looked up. “Okay?”

“If you don’t want the club,” Debbie said, “you should sell it.”

Lou looked down again. “Yeah. I’m gonna.”

 

The dress was one Debbie had been eyeing, and while Debbie rarely refused herself something she wanted, she kept looking it over in the window and thinking what a waste, a dress like that and no reason to wear it. But then Lou came back, and then Daphne decided to throw a party, and Debbie had mentioned that she’d finally have a use for that dress at Saks. “What’s it look like?” Lou had asked, her eyebrows lifting.

“Excessive,” Debbie had said, and really, it was a dress for which there was no possible excuse. But she wasn’t in the business of making excuses. Daphne would like it, Lou would like it, and Debbie was thrilled to really, properly want the thing and know that she would have it.

“You’ll fit right in.” When Daphne hosted, the party was always a spectacle. _Why the fuck not_ was her usual motto. Once there had been a lion. Most of the team dressed their best, glad for the chance to go overboard.

And sure, Debbie was looking forward to the party. She made up an asymmetrical hairdo as she went, and it ended up falling down on her right shoulder. She didn’t wear any jewelry, but she did go for dark red lipstick. And since they’d been in and out of the same jack-and-jill bathroom all night, Debbie felt a particular satisfaction at the full up-down look she got when, finally ready, she’d stepped into Lou’s room to see when she wanted to go. Lou was leaving again, she reminded herself. Lou, who was leaving again, had looked her up and down in her new dress. Lou, who was leaving, thought she looked good and wanted her to know it. Debbie shuffled her feet. “I’m almost ready,” Lou said, and she was getting her jewelry on, so Debbie walked over by the jewelry box, eyed the suit critically, selected a pair of earrings. Put them in one at a time. She didn’t tell Lou she was going to, but they were people who paid attention to how others moved around them. Debbie grabbed the keys after, and she met Lou by the car.

She was thinking about it all evening, what Lou had said. “I thought once I was actually here—but.” _But what?_ Debbie wanted to ask, from that conversation all the way until they arrived at the party, and after one drink, _What isn’t how you thought it would be?_ and after two, _Because I’m not how I thought I would be, and maybe_ —but two drinks was her limit for the night, not enough to make her talk to _Lou_ about _feelings_ in the middle of Daphne Kluger’s cocktail party with all their friends, too many to start her on anything new. Lou mentioned it to Amita, that she was going to sell the club, head back out of town, spend a little longer in the wildly growing places of northern California or southern Oregon. Debbie could never—the woods, the gray coastline, the isolation—but Lou had always been the type to spin gold from what she saw, and she hated New York City. Amita had looked curiously at Debbie, and later, when Debbie was out on the balcony, Amita came not to chastise her for running off alone but to say, “Are you going with her?”

“She’s leaving,” Debbie said.

“Okay,” Amita said, “I’m going to need a little more information here.”

“There is no more information,” said Debbie. “She went away, she dreaded coming back, she came back anyway, she was disappointed, she decided to leave again.” Not for the first time, she saw how appealing it might be to cry as easily as Lou did, and then let something go. Amita put an arm around her shoulders, and Debbie wasn’t sure whether she had _ever_ touched Amita, but these things came easily for some people. Her professional tendency to fly through boundaries made her more sensitive to them personally, the risk of treating people she loved like they could belong to her if she just said so, but Amita was actually kind.

“Do you want me to poison her? Because I couldn’t beat her in a fight, but I could feed her silver and turn her blue.” It was a grotesque joke, the idea of hurting Lou to keep her from hurting Debbie, but it was the kind of grotesque joke that offered Debbie an ally, so she laughed. “Seriously, though, are you okay?”

Debbie shrugged. “It’s her choice,” she said. When Amita didn’t answer, she said, “I don’t—what I don’t get is why she stayed—before—and left now.”

Amita still didn’t speak right away. Then she said, “Are you going to ask her?”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know the answer.”

“Oh, honey,” Amita said, because now Debbie was the kind of person people said _Oh, honey_ to. “Will you come back in? It’s not the same without you. And as much as I want to know all the news, I also want to get back in there.”

Debbie stood up. “What good is a new dress if you skip the party, hmm?”

Lou raised her eyebrows when Amita and Debbie came back in, a brief _nothing wrong?_ sort of check-in. Debbie looked away. Daphne got to her first.

 

Maybe she couldn’t be sure, but she’d have put down money that Lou was crying again that night. Again. In her own room, but with the bathroom door ajar, which was particularly infuriating. She knew Debbie was attuned to her surroundings, more than most. Was she _hoping_ Debbie would hear her? If she wanted something from Debbie, why wouldn’t she bring it up? And if she didn’t want something from Debbie, well, why wouldn’t she keep it to herself? Debbie sighed, and she took as long in the bathroom as she could. She undid her hair one pin at a time, took off her makeup precisely, put her hair in a braid to sleep in and didn’t like it and took the braid out and redid it. She contemplated taking a bath, but she didn’t really want to stay awake that long. Lou didn’t come into the bathroom. When she finally went into her own room, she left her door to the bathroom open. If it happened again, she decided, she would go to Lou—take her a glass of water, say _What’s going on, babe?_ , act normal but touch her arms or her back, stay ready to run if Lou didn’t want her. The door between her room and the bathroom closed in a few minutes. She took that as a cue to turn out the light.

 

“Hey, um,” Debbie said the next day after they’d eaten lunch, “I don’t mean to rush you into anything, but do I need to find a new place to live?”

Lou looked up, surprised, and didn’t speak immediately. “I thought you’d want to,” she said eventually. “You can—definitely do better.”

“You think?”

Lou’s smile was soft. “If you want to stay here, I—”

“No, you,” Debbie said, “you should do what you need.”

“Right,” said Lou, and then she cleared her throat. “I mean, it doesn’t matter. I can keep the place. I’ve recently come into rather a large sum of money.”

Debbie rolled her eyes, glad to be back on familiar ground.

“You have any plans?”

“What, the one we just did wasn’t elaborate enough for you?”

“Fair,” said Lou, maybe on purpose, maybe realizing she was saving Debbie from saying she had nothing at all, and that freedom didn’t bring the pleasure it once did. “But I’ve never known you to sit around. Guess I figured you might have missed some other things inside.”

“Like what?”

Lou held her gaze for a moment. Shrugged. “I don’t know, Paris?”

“I’m on parole.”

“And?”

“And I’m sure not going back to prison. You know Danny gave up years of his life by violating his parole.”

“Yeah, because he did it before the job. You could pay off the whole State of New York.”

“For Paris?”

“You got somewhere else you’d like to go?”

She didn’t know what the fuck Lou wanted from her. Lou was the one who was leaving. Lou was the one who could have asked her along. It was Lou’s decisions they were living with now. “I told you, no plans.”

Lou looked uncomfortable, some way Debbie couldn’t quite put a finger on. She cleared the table. Debbie went out to walk.

She walked for hours; she arrived home to find herself alone. But Lou leaving was a ghost in the walls. The same sense of it as _Lou’s place_ that had made the loft a place of comfort while she was gone before, now it made Debbie want to put on an extra sweater. She couldn’t stay here, and she had nowhere to go. She needed a plan to build, virtually any plan. She sat with her computer on the couch because she was too grown to sequester herself in her own room, not because she wanted to stay in hearing range of the door. She didn’t find any inspiration reading about the latest advances in safe technology, but it was important to stay up to date in your field. Lou came home and handed her a paper cup; Debbie sniffed at the hole in the lid. Hot chocolate. “Thank you,” she called, but Lou had already closed the door to her room.

When she came back, dressed down a little, Debbie said, “How does one sell a club, exactly?”

Debbie was sitting with her legs crossed on the sofa, and Lou joined her there, legs spread so one knee notched under Debbie’s. “I don’t know what other people do, but I plan to make a deal with somebody I like.”

“And do you—have someone in mind?”

“Hoping to throw your hat in the ring?” Debbie rolled her eyes. “I think a few people on the staff might go in on it. I’ll give them a good deal.”

“How good?”

“A dollar and free drinks for life?”

“Only sounds like a good deal if they haven’t seen you drink.”

Lou chuckled, but faintly. Debbie couldn’t actually remember seeing Lou drink much since she’d got out. Another change she hadn’t realized would matter. “They shouldn’t have to serve me too often.”

Debbie was going to get used to it eventually. The crushing feeling in her chest would go away. Lou slumped down farther on the sofa, her free leg sticking out straight. Debbie waited for her to slide just over, lean against Debbie’s side, but she didn’t. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Don’t know yet?”

“All right, well, in or out?”

“In. I mean, takeout is fine, but I don’t feel like noise.”

“No, I want to cook, I think.”

Debbie frowned. Lou didn’t mind cooking, but she rarely went out of her way to do it. It was something she only cared about when she felt unsettled. Debbie searched her brain for the right gesture of comfort-but-with-plausible-deniability to use with Lou, but she couldn’t remember. She settled for a hand on Lou’s thigh and a “Need me to get anything?” as she stood up.

Lou shook her head. “You can come to the store if you want,” she said.

Debbie didn’t really want to go out. “Sure,” she said. “Let me get some shoes.”

They were quiet in the car. In the store, Lou offered a few things as suggestions about dinner; Debbie acquiesced to everything until she stopped asking, though that hadn’t been Debbie’s intent. At the ice cream aisle, Debbie pressed herself beside Lou to turn the cart, but instead of staying next to her, Lou turned it over to her with a laugh and walked up ahead to pull out the ice cream she knew Debbie would want. They checked out—it was Lou’s favorite grocery store, so she’d never stolen even a pack of gum here—and drove home, and Lou made herself busy in the kitchen while Debbie went upstairs to take off her shoes and got distracted by her phone. When she left her room, Lou was dropping a pan on the stove from too high, marching heavily across the kitchen, practically throwing a bag of pasta onto the counter.

Debbie made her way tentatively down the stairs. There were tears. _Again_. Debbie froze, but she’d planned for this. She’d already decided what to say and she’d already decided what to do and she had done that specifically in case of this moment. She walked into the kitchen. There was no sneaking up on Lou. Getting her a glass of water might not make sense right now. She skipped that step. “What’s going on, babe?” she said.

Lou looked over at Debbie, turned away, wiped her face on her arm, turned back. “Just making dinner,” she said wryly, hoarsely.

Debbie might not have planned for this enough. She took a step closer.

Lou turned back to her cutting board. Picked up a knife. “Jesus, Lou, will you put the knife down, please?”

Lou put the knife down. Turned around. Debbie didn’t know where to go: stay facing her? Stand beside her, also leaning against the counter? Go close enough to touch? Touching was part of the plan, but the plan wasn’t serving her in this situation.

Debbie crossed her arms and then uncrossed them. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

Lou shrugged, looking like she wanted to leave the room.

Debbie’s frustration was building, and she didn’t know what to say, so she said: “I don’t even know what I’m allowed to ask you.”

To her surprise, Lou nodded quickly, bent her head forward almost into her chest, bent her whole body forward—and Debbie reached out for her, grabbed her arms, slid underneath her.

“Hey,” she said, “hey, Lou, Lou, Lou.” She tried to stand up; she more or less managed it, Lou’s head pointing straight down into her shoulder in a position that couldn’t possibly have been comfortable. She stood that way for a good while.

“Sorry,” Lou mumbled eventually, lifting her head.

“It’s okay.”

“Your shirt.”

“It’s okay.”

Lou nodded.

“So?”

Lou gave a little head-shaking shrug. “I thought,” she said, “when I got back.”

Debbie nodded.

Lou didn’t say anything else.

“I thought, when I got out,” Debbie said.

Lou looked up.

Debbie didn’t say anything else.

“That sounds right,” said Lou, with a little laugh.

“I still need some help here,” Debbie said.

“I really loved it out there. But you were here. And I guess with everything over, I thought we would—”

“We would?”

Lou shrugged.

“Rob a liquor store. Get matching tattoos. Have a lot of sex. Die in a suicide pact. Get really bored. Run away together.”

“Be on the same page?”

Debbie was going to die. “And what page is that?”

Lou did a quick breath that might have been a laugh. “I hate this,” she said.

Debbie waited.

“What did you think you couldn’t ask me?”

“Wow,” said Debbie, “I hate this.”

Lou chuckled, but she fucking waited.

“I don’t know what to do if you leave. But that’s not,” Debbie shrugged, “not your problem.” Maybe if she said enough, her chest would stop feeling like it was caving in. “And I don’t—” _know why you stayed until right now—_ “no, I don’t want to ask that.”

“You can’t go _anywhere_ else?”

Still tentative: “I didn’t know if you’d have me.”

Lou stared. “You’re serious,” she said. “All of this, and that’s— _Yeah, Lou, sell the club! Do whatever you want!_ How was I supposed to—” she sighed. “This is going to be a talk, isn’t it? Can we sit down?”

Debbie was a little afraid to move out of the reach of Lou’s body heat. She took her arm and led her to the couch.

“You know, I can find the sofa,” Lou said, but she went along.

“Okay,” Debbie said, when Lou was on one side of the couch and she was in the middle of it, facing Lou with her knees up in front of her and her arm against the back cushions.

“Okay. I don’t want to leave you. Clear enough?”

Debbie nodded. “But you were going to.”

“I was.”

“Yeah, _why?_ ”

“I thought you—I don’t know, wouldn’t care. Got what you wanted.”

“That’s—”

“Don’t say it’s unreasonable.”

“It’s not unreasonable. It’s not true, though.”

“Fine. I didn’t know if I still fit in once the plan was over. I thought maybe when I got back, it would be obvious, but.”

“Jesus, Lou, just because I don’t know how to structure my life doesn’t mean I don’t want you in it.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“I mean, kind of.”

“I do want to leave,” said Lou, turning her head a little to look Debbie right in the eye.

“You make the plan,” said Debbie. 

Lou raised an eyebrow. 

“And if I don’t like it, I’ll make a new plan.”

That got her a laugh. Got her a hand slipped into hers. “How will you do with none at all?”

Debbie slid forward just enough for her feet to slip under Lou’s thighs, her knee against Lou’s shoulder. She sat up long enough to say, “I trust you.” And then, once her head was against the back of the couch: “But do I get to know when we leave?”

“The minute you’re ready,” said Lou. “Not tonight. I have to finish things up at the club. The minute you’re ready tomorrow or later.”

“Can I wake you up at five in the morning?”

“How do you feel about road safety?”

“A lot better than I feel about waking up at five in the morning.”

“Perfect.”

They sat there long enough that Debbie decided to order a pizza instead of waiting for Lou to cook. She pulled the phone out of her pocket and started talking, and Lou chuckled when she realized what the call was about. She moved to stand up, and Debbie stuck a leg out in front of her. “If I wanted you to get up and go into the kitchen, I wouldn’t have called for a pizza.”

“I have to put away the food on the counter.”

“When the pizza comes,” said Debbie, and they sat there a little longer. “How much stuff can I take?”

“On the bike? How much stuff are you unable to live without?”

“I wish there was a good place to hand off my nice dresses to girls who need to get revenge.”

“You can keep them here.”

But while Lou was at the club, Debbie packed a few days’ clothes—she’d have to borrow things from the bike—and a couple sentimental books and bits of jewelry and her computer and chargers and set the bag in a chair by the door. The rest of it could burn. She woke up when she heard the front door open, and Lou knew she would: she stopped at Debbie’s door to say, quietly, “It’s all set.” And when Debbie, still pleasantly drowsy since the footsteps were Lou’s, didn’t answer: “Sleep well. Love you.” Debbie slept.

**Author's Note:**

> Since there’s no like kissing or whatever in this fic, feel free to imagine it followed by a fic where THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED. But like, a slow burn of only one bed. In like the third place they stay, there's only one bed. (There is already [a QUALITY only one bed fic in this fandom where like Debbie doesn't have any things and they get really wet in like Pennsylvania or Ohio or something and Debbie takes a shower and Lou is a MESS?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14993801) [Thanks SmoakingQueens for the link.] It wouldn't follow logically from this fic in any way, but if I have annoyed you by bringing up the one-bed premise without actually using it, that's one I recommend.)


End file.
